Working With Rails

1. History

I have been a developer since 1997 when I started out as the sysadmin and lone develoepr at a startup ISP. Since then I’ve worked with ASP (classic), PHP, Javascript, Flash, Java, Python, and eventually Ruby.

In 2006 I struck off on my own and founded Rising Tide Software. After 2 years, I am now independent again and pursuing various personal projects.

2. Interests

I have been an educator for the past 3 years, teaching several programming related courses in the Visual and Graphics Programming track at the Art Institute of Phoenix. I’m also involved in the various local Phoenix user groups giving presentations at the Ruby User Group (http://www.rubyaz.org), Rails User Group, Java User Group and the Phoenix chapter of the IGDA. I frequently speak at events, some of the major ones have included JavaOne, RubyConf and SXSW.

3. Projects

I’ve authored a few libraries, most notably the Monkeybars library (http://www.monkeybars.org/) and the Rawr packaging system (http://rawr.rubyforge.org/), both hosted on Rubyforge. Both are JRuby based and enable Ruby to take advantage of Java libraries (Swing and the jar packaging system respectively).